A number of applications in multichannel audio require accurate sound field analysis such as multichannel speech enhancement for telephony, multichannel speech enhancement for robust automatic speech recognition (ASR), and spatial sound reproduction. However, device geometry and the number of microphones included in the device can limit the performance of conventional digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms for sound field analysis. Traditional multi-source localization often does not perform consistently well for arbitrary microphone arrays.
As part of DSP for sound field analysis, conventional techniques may calculate a direction of arrival (DOA) which denotes the direction from which a propagating wave arrives at the microphone array. However, DOA typically cannot be resolved above spatial aliasing frequencies using traditional DSP methods, and typically cannot be resolved at low frequencies due to acoustic noise and low spatial resolution.